Why we enjoy videogames

Critical Gamer writes: I’ve recently started allowing my five year old daughter to play Red Dead Redemption.

Okay, I’ve immediately left myself wide open to accusations of bad parenting, but please; let me explain. She sees none of the sex (of which there is practically zero anyway), none of the violence, none of the blood, and none of the bad language. She saw me start to play it one night just before she went to bed, and loved it. She’s currently into the whole cowboy thing thanks to Woody from the Toy Story movies. A dream come true for her!

If she's just riding around not participating in any of the more gritty actions of the game then it might be ok. But there's still a chance that she might ride into trouble and her character gets killed. Seeing the horse getting mauled by a bear, considering the realistic nature of the physics and sound in the game, would be hard to explain to a five year old.

You mentioned Toy Story. Why not get her Toy Story 3? Not sure it features the riding part but it seems like more of a game that she can enjoy all aspects of instead of just the riding and potential bear molestation.

Its an M rated game for a reason. Sure you can ride horses, lasso some wildlife, and so on. But sooner or later, the random activities while she is doing those things will give her a rude awakening. Also, todays five year olds are smarter than yesterdays five year olds, so she will start experimenting with the button combinations eventually.

In essence, you are basically handing your five year old a box of matches. Sure, she might look at and just play with the box, but eventually she will figure out how to open up the package and go from there.

not really, 5 year olds are 5 year olds no matter what timeline they're from, its the fact that tech is more available now that they can get familiar with it.

And playing RDR is not like handing a child a box of matches, just pressing button combinations will not magically scar her for life, people treat kids like they're extremely fragile, they learn to fight and lie, get hurt and make mistakes all the time without video games but when it may have violence in it all of a sudden its child abuse to let them play it.

Some supervision and control on what she does in the game, like maybe just riding around or horse breaking, even hunting is not going to send her to therapy, its just about balance and limiting what she is exposed to in the game.

And all that talk about "the random activities while she is doing those things will give her a rude awakening" is nonsense, the game random activities is limited mainly to people and animals shooting at you or killing each other as you pass by, thats not something a 5 year old hasn't seen on tv on any PG rated show. And her character dying will only annoy her not make her cry and scared.